Latest news with #Yalta
News.com.au
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Student discovers hidden aquarium in shocking place
As a busy medical school student, Gita Lozovaya spends much of her time studying, but decided to unwind one day at the beach with a friend. Residing in Yalta, a seaside town on the south coast of the Crimean Peninsula, she explained on her day off from college, she and her friend decided to have a picnic by the sea. 'Walking along the beach, we saw a blue car in which fish of amazing beauty swam [like an aquarium],' she said. Lozovaya discovered the unique fish tank outside the Yalta-Intourist Hotel. The student learned from the director of a local aquarium — who hasn't been named — that the life-size car was converted into a koi-filled aquarium seven years prior. 'I was told that the car was completely converted into an aquarium, and the inside was covered with a special compound that eliminates the appearance of rust,' Lozovaya added. 'It is absolutely safe for fish.' A fascinated Lozovaya sent videos to friends and family — and also posted a clip of the peculiar fish tank to TikTok, where it quickly went viral, amassing over 4 million views. 'The next day, while I was studying, a huge number of notifications started coming to my phone saying that people liked my video,' the 20-year-old explained. 'People were fascinated by the car and asked a lot of questions.' Thousands of people in the comment section of the viral video couldn't get enough of this fishy situation. 'Marine biologist here, these fish are not living in safe conditions because it's illegal to drive without a seatbelt, and they could get hurt,' one user quipped in the comment section. 'This is actually really dangerous because the fish could learn to drive and then they might crash,' another person humorously wrote. 'Oi mate, you can't just park there,' another funny comment read. 'People are mad in the comments, but that is better than a Walmart fishbowl that parents get their kids' pet fish, in my opinion,' argued one commenter, defending the unique aquarium. 'Why y'all acting like they're swimming in gasoline,' agreed another. The nursing student also informed commenters that the roof opens up, which allows aquarium staff to clean the tank and feed the fish living inside the car.
Japan Times
18-03-2025
- Politics
- Japan Times
Trump discussion with Putin to focus on what Ukraine will lose
To hear U.S. President Donald Trump describe it, he and President Vladimir Putin of Russia are about to have something akin to their own Yalta moment, great powers determining borders within Europe. He didn't explicitly refer to the 1945 meeting, where Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and a deathly ill Franklin D. Roosevelt carved the continent into the American-aligned West and the Soviet-dominated East, creating spheres of influence that became the battlegrounds of the Cold War. But talking to reporters on Air Force One while returning from Florida on Sunday night, Trump made clear that his scheduled phone conversation with Putin on Tuesday would be focused on what lands and assets Russia would retain in any ceasefire with Ukraine. He will, in essence, be negotiating over how large a reward Russia will receive for its 11 years of open aggression against Ukraine, starting with its seizure of Crimea in 2014 and extending through the full-scale war Putin started three years ago. White House aides have made clear that Russia will certainly retain Crimea — in one of those odd twists of history, the location of the weeklong Yalta Conference in February 1945 — and strongly suggested it would get almost all of the territory it holds. Though administration officials have stressed that they have kept their Ukrainian counterparts and European leaders fully briefed on their interactions with Russia, only Trump and Putin will be on the call, presumably with aides listening in. And it is not clear that either Ukraine or the big European powers will go along with whatever Trump and Putin might agree on. Trump and his aides have been circumspect about the details of the deal being discussed with the Russian leader. Steve Witkoff, the New York real estate developer and old friend of Trump's who is now special envoy to the Middle East, spent hours with Putin in Moscow recently preparing for the call. "We're doing pretty well, I think, with Russia,' Trump said, adding "I think we have a very good chance' of reaching a ceasefire. But then he turned to the question of what Ukraine might have to give up. "I think we'll be talking about land, it's a lot of land,' he said. "It's a lot different than it was before the war, as you know. We'll be talking about land. We'll be talking about power plants,' apparently referring to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest nuclear site in Europe. "That's a big question. But I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides.' Trump was careful not to say much about which parts of Ukrainian territory he was discussing, or whether he would try to limit Putin's ambitions. The Trump administration has already made clear it expects Russia to control the land that its troops already command, roughly 20% of Ukraine. But aides to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine said last month they were concerned that Trump may entertain Putin's other desires for parts of Ukraine, perhaps including the critical port of Odesa. Trump's national security adviser, Michael Waltz, said on "Meet the Press' on NBC over the weekend that he expected the talks with Russia to be pragmatic, and he deflected any discussion of whether Russia was being rewarded for its aggression. As a member of Congress, Waltz was a vocal defender of Ukraine and its sovereignty. As the head of Trump's National Security Council, he has avoided stating the obvious, that Russia began the war. "Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea?' Waltz asked in the NBC interview. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as seen from the city of Nikopol, Ukraine, in October 2022 | Finbarr O'Reilly / The New York Times In his television appearances in recent weeks, Waltz has taken the position that the most important outcome of the talks should be an end to the killing after three years of vicious trench and drone warfare. He and other Trump aides say little about the conditions attached to a ceasefire, but suggest they are secondary to that larger mission. The alternative, Waltz has suggested, was a policy closer to former President Joe Biden's strategy: assuring Ukraine that the U.S. and its allies were with them "as long as it takes.' That is a prescription, Waltz insisted Sunday, for "essentially endless warfare in an environment that we're literally losing hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of months.' And he warned that the conflict could still "escalate into World War III,' echoing the case that Trump was making to Zelenskyy in their heated, public argument in the Oval Office last month. "We can talk about what's right and wrong, and we also have to talk about the reality of the situation on the ground,' Waltz said. There are other issues that may become central to the negotiation. France and Britain have offered to put troops inside Ukraine, perhaps with other European powers. But it is not clear that Putin will agree to a peacekeeping or "trip wire' force. Those forces would be part of a security guarantee for Ukraine, although it is unclear how effective European troops would be without backup from the United States. There are other signs that Trump is getting ready to make concessions to Putin. The Justice Department has told European officials that the United States is withdrawing from a multinational group investigating leaders responsible for the invasion of Ukraine, including Putin. The administration is also shrinking the work done by the Justice Department's War Crimes Accountability Team, created in 2022 by Merrick Garland, attorney general under Biden, to hold accountable Russians who were responsible for atrocities committed in the aftermath of the full invasion three years ago. Taken together, those actions are a major retreat from an effort announced by then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2023 after the U.S. concluded that Russia had committed "crimes against humanity.' The steps appear to be part of Trump's effort to make it easier to come to an accord with Putin. No historical analogy to a previous era is exact, of course, and the negotiation to end the war in Ukraine has many differences from the conditions in the depths of the winter of 1945, when it was clear that Nazi Germany would soon lose. But as Monica Duffy Toft, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, wrote in Foreign Affairs recently, "today's geopolitical landscape particularly resembles the close of World War II' because "major powers are seeking to negotiate a new global order primarily with each other, much as Allied leaders did when they redrew the world map' at Yalta. In an interview, Toft said that land expansion "is what Putin wants, and it's obviously what Trump wants — just look at Greenland and Panama and Canada.' She continued: "This is what these leaders think they need to do to make their countries great again.' "The big question mark is China,' she added. The outcome of the negotiations — and particularly the question of whether Putin is rewarded for what has been a brutally expensive war, "may indicate what will happen if Xi Jinping decides he wants to take Taiwan.'
New York Times
17-03-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Trump Discussion With Putin to Focus on What Ukraine Will Lose
To hear President Trump describe it, he and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia are about to have something akin to their own Yalta moment, great powers determining borders within Europe. He didn't explicitly refer to the 1945 meeting, where Churchill, Stalin and a deathly ill Franklin D. Roosevelt carved the continent into the American-aligned West and the Soviet-dominated East, creating spheres of influence that became the battlegrounds of the Cold War. But talking to reporters on Air Force One while returning from Florida on Sunday night, Mr. Trump made clear that his scheduled phone conversation with Mr. Putin on Tuesday would be focused on what lands and assets Russia would retain in any cease-fire with Ukraine. He will, in essence, be negotiating over how large a reward Russia will receive for its 11 years of open aggression against Ukraine, starting with its seizure of Crimea in 2014 and extending through the full-scale war Mr. Putin started three years ago. White House aides have made clear that Russia will certainly retain Crimea — in one of those odd twists of history, the location of the weeklong Yalta Conference in February 1945 — and strongly suggested it would get almost all of the territory it holds. Though administration officials have stressed that they have kept their Ukrainian counterparts and European leaders fully briefed on their interactions with Russia, only Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin will be on the call, presumably with aides listening in. And it is not clear that either Ukraine or the big European powers will go along with whatever Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin might agree on. Mr. Trump and his aides have been circumspect about the details of the deal being discussed with the Russian leader. Steve Witkoff, the New York real estate developer and old friend of Mr. Trump's who is now special envoy to the Middle East, spent hours with Mr. Putin in Moscow recently preparing for the call. 'We're doing pretty well, I think, with Russia,' Mr. Trump said, adding 'I think we have a very good chance' of reaching a cease-fire. But then he turned to the question of what Ukraine might have to give up. 'I think we'll be talking about land, it's a lot of land,' he said. 'It's a lot different than it was before the war, as you know. We'll be talking about land. We'll be talking about power plants,' apparently referring to the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, the largest nuclear site in Europe. 'That's a big question. But I think we have a lot of it already discussed very much by both sides.' Mr. Trump was careful not to say much about which parts of Ukrainian territory he was discussing, or whether he would try to limit Mr. Putin's ambitions. The Trump administration has already made clear it expects Russia to control the land that its troops already command, roughly 20 percent of Ukraine. But aides to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said last month they were concerned that Mr. Trump may entertain Mr. Putin's other desires for parts of Ukraine, perhaps including the critical port of Odesa. Mr. Trump's national security adviser, Michael Waltz, said on 'Meet the Press' on NBC over the weekend that he expected the talks with Russia to be pragmatic, and he deflected any discussion of whether Russia was being rewarded for its aggression. (As a member of Congress, Mr. Waltz was a vocal defender of Ukraine and its sovereignty. As the head of Mr. Trump's National Security Council, he has avoided stating the obvious, that Russia began the war.) 'Are we going to drive every Russian off of every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea?' Mr. Waltz asked in the NBC interview. In his television appearances in recent weeks, Mr. Waltz has taken the position that the most important outcome of the talks should be an end to the killing after three years of vicious trench and drone warfare. He and other Trump aides say little about the conditions attached to a cease-fire, but suggest they are secondary to that larger mission. The alternative, Mr. Waltz has suggested, was a policy closer to former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s strategy: assuring Ukraine that the U.S. and its allies were with them 'as long as it takes.' That is a prescription, Mr. Waltz insisted on Sunday, of 'essentially endless warfare in an environment that we're literally losing hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of months.' And he warned that the conflict could still 'escalate into World War III,' echoing the case that Mr. Trump was making to Mr. Zelensky in their heated, public argument in the Oval Office last month. 'We can talk about what's right and wrong, and we also have to talk about the reality of the situation on the ground,' Mr. Waltz said. There are other issues that may become central to the negotiation. France and Britain have offered to put troops inside Ukraine, perhaps with other European powers. But it is not clear that Mr. Putin will agree to a peacekeeping or 'trip wire' force. Those forces would be part of a security guarantee for Ukraine, though it is unclear how effective European troops would be without backup from Washington. There are other signs that Mr. Trump is getting ready to make concessions to Mr. Putin. The Justice Department has told European officials that the United States is withdrawing from a multinational group investigating leaders responsible for the invasion of Ukraine, including Mr. Putin. The administration is also shrinking the work done by the Justice Department's War Crimes Accountability Team, created in 2022 by Merrick B. Garland, attorney general under Mr. Biden, to hold accountable Russians who were responsible for atrocities committed in the aftermath of the full invasion three years ago. Taken together, those actions are a major retreat from an effort announced by then-Vice President Kamala Harris in 2023 after the U.S. concluded that Russia had committed 'crimes against humanity.' The steps appear to be part of Mr. Trump's effort to make it easier to come to an accord with Mr. Putin. No historical analogy to a previous era is exact, of course, and the negotiation to end the war in Ukraine has many differences from the conditions in the depths of the winter of 1945, when it was clear that Nazi Germany would soon lose. But as Monica Duffy Toft, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, wrote in Foreign Affairs recently, 'today's geopolitical landscape particularly resembles the close of World War II' because 'major powers are seeking to negotiate a new global order primarily with each other, much as Allied leaders did when they redrew the world map' at Yalta. In an interview, Professor Toft said that land expansion 'is what Putin wants, and it's obviously what Trump wants — just look at Greenland and Panama and Canada.' She continued: 'This is what these leaders think they need to do to make their countries great again.' 'The big question mark is China,' she added. The outcome of the negotiations — and particularly the question of whether Mr. Putin is rewarded for what has been a brutally expensive war, 'may indicate what will happen if Xi Jinping decides he wants to take Taiwan.'
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Moscow demanded NATO withdrawal from eastern Europe during US-Russia talks, FT reports
During U.S.-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia, Moscow allegedly demanded that the U.S. withdraw NATO forces from eastern Europe as a condition for "normalizing relations," the Financial Times (FT) reported on Feb. 20, citing two officials in the region. The U.S. delegation reportedly rejected the demand, but concerns remain over what concessions President Donald Trump might consider to secure a deal with Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer are set to visit Washington next week for talks with Trump, where they are expected to urge him not to concede to Russia's demands. One unnamed eastern European official told the FT that regional governments are increasingly worried about the trajectory of U.S.-Russia talks and whether their concerns will be taken seriously in the White House. Cristian Diaconescu, the Romanian president's chief of staff, warned that the U.S.-Russia dialogue risks a "new Yalta," referring to the 1945 conference where the Allies divided post-war Europe into spheres of influence. Russian President Vladimir Putin frequently claims that NATO poses a threat to Russia, accusing the alliance of seeking to expand its borders eastward. Moscow has repeatedly used Ukraine's possible entry into NATO as one of the justifications for launching its full-scale invasion. Kyiv argues that joining the alliance would provide it with a vital security guarantee, preventing any future invasion of its territory. The Saudi Arabia meeting on Feb. 18 marked the highest-level U.S.-Russia talks since the full-scale invasion began in 2022. No concrete decisions were announced, but Moscow and Washington described the discussions as constructive. Ukraine's exclusion from the talks has sparked concerns in Kyiv and Europe. Read also: Europe, rearming is cheaper than war We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
The Guardian
13-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Trump's senseless capitulation to Putin is a betrayal of Ukraine – and terrible dealmaking
Donald Trump's appeasement of Vladimir Putin makes Neville Chamberlain look like a principled, courageous realist. At least Chamberlain was trying to prevent a major European war, whereas Trump is acting in the middle of one. Trump's 'Munich' (synonymous in English with the 1938 deal in which Britain and France sold out Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany) comes on the eve of the big security conference in today's Bavarian capital, where his emissaries will meet western allies. That Munich security conference must be the beginning of a decisive European response, learning from our own tragic history in order to avoid repeating it. The next step Trump proposes is in effect a new 'Yalta' (referring to the February 1945 US-Soviet-UK summit in the Crimean resort of Yalta, which has become synonymous with superpowers deciding the fate of European countries over their heads). In this case, his proposal is that the US and Russia should decide the fate of Ukraine with marginal if any involvement of Ukraine or other European countries. But this time the occupants of the White House and the Kremlin should meet first in Saudi Arabia, then in their respective capitals, while it seems the actual Yalta, in the Crimea, is to be ceded to Russia. For in the brave new world of Trump and Putin, might is right and territorial expansion is what great powers do, be it Russia to Ukraine, the US to Canada and Greenland – or China to Taiwan. All historical analogies have their limits and those with 'Munich' and 'Yalta' have been overused. But here, for once, they do feel apposite – so long as we highlight differences as well as similarities. For a few weeks after Trump's election we had a faint hope that when it came to Ukraine his administration would follow its proclaimed motto of 'peace through strength', understanding that strength is the only language Putin comprehends. Now we see that Trump not only bullies his country's friends but sucks up to his country's enemies. This so-called strongman is actually a weak man when it comes to confronting the hostile authoritarians of this world. In just one day, he has made four large, unnecessary and damaging concessions. First, he has not just initiated exploratory talks with Putin via an intermediary, which would be defensible, but personally given the Russian dictator fulsome and sycophantic recognition as a world leader. 'We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations,' he reported of their long phone call, in a social media post. They discussed 'the great benefit that we will someday have in working together. But first, as we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine.' Imagine if in 1941, instead of entering the war against Nazi Germany on the side of Britain and other allied European nations, the president of the United States had rung up Hitler, reflected on 'the Great History of our Nations', and then talked about jointly ending 'the War with Germany/Britain'. Second, he has offered the Russian leader a bilateral US-Russian negotiation over the heads of the Ukrainians, precisely the kind of new Yalta that Putin has always wanted. And then, third and fourth, he has declared that Ukraine will almost certainly have to concede territory and that the US will not support its membership of Nato. Both those things have been said privately in Washington and other western capitals for some time, but publicly conceding them upfront is a masterclass in how not to practise the 'art of the deal'. (He did something similar in negotiations with the Taliban over Afghanistan, starting rather than ending with a timetable for US withdrawal.) Historians now have the notes and recollections of those close to Hitler, documenting his delight at the deal he exacted from Chamberlain. One day, we may have similar evidence of Putin's private glee at the concessions made by Trump. This doesn't mean there will be anything deserving the name of peace any time soon. The Kremlin's first public readout from the Trump-Putin call was notably cautious, warning that it is 'essential to settle the reasons for the conflict'. Probably Putin's ideal scenario would be to keep talking peace with Trump, through a series of leisurely summits in Saudi Arabia, the US and Russia, while Russia continues to press forward on the battlefield, demolish Ukraine's energy infrastructure and undermine its economy, society and political unity in other ways. (Asked about the involvement of Ukraine in the talks, Trump mentioned the need for a presidential election there, thus parroting a Russian attack line on the legitimacy of president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.) There's one huge difference between Europe at the time of the original Munich and Yalta, and Europe now. Today's Europe is rich, free, democratic and a closely integrated community of partners and allies. Yes, as recent polling by the European Council on Foreign Relations again demonstrates, it's also divided and confused about the best way forward for Ukraine. But with a sufficiently determined coalition of willing and capable countries, definitely including Britain, Europe can still enable Ukraine to stabilise the frontline, hold up economically and eventually get to negotiate from strength, not weakness. That's why this weekend's Munich security conference must be the beginning of a European riposte to Trump's Munich. Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist
